Fluent Inc., the world leader in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software and services, will showcase the expanded spectrum of CFD simulations for automotive applications found in FLUENT 6.2, during the 2005 SAE World Congress in Detroit, April 11-14. This latest release has over 300 new capabilities, many of which are uniquely important for automotive simulations. At the same time, key enhancements to the core FLUENT solver have led to dramatic speed-ups and improved accuracy, significantly boosting performance for many automotive simulations.

CEI announced today that its EnSight software has been tested and verified on Windows 64-bit platforms, making it the first high-end visualization package to fully support Microsoft's newest operating systems. The 64-bit versions of EnSight and the free geometry viewer EnLiten will be available concurrently with the release of Microsoft's Windows XP x64 and Windows 2003 Server x64 operating systems.

Internal testing using large datasets has shown a 30 percent increase in performance running EnSight in 64-bit mode versus 32-bit mode on the same machine. Perhaps more importantly, Windows x64 supports up to 128 GB of RAM, allowing visualizations of models that in the past were too large to display on desktop systems.

CFD is a complex toolset that, with traditional tools, requires expert knowledge and a lot of resources (hardware) to run effectively. The reason for the ‘expert-only’ tag is firstly, the complex nature of setting up the analysis studies and then to measure the accuracy of the results and interpret them. So if CFD is to move into mainstream design and engineering, these challenges need to be overcome.